What are New York and San Francisco Tweeting About?

New Yorkers are always complaining about the weather, while San Franciscans tend to moan about the city's perpetually poor MUNI bus service. That's not just a stereotype — it turns out there's hard, Twitter-based evidence for it.

London-based social analysis company Peerindex took a look at the tweets of a pretty substantial test group from both cities — 1.6 million people living in New York and San Francisco — for the 30 days leading up to March 5. Between them, the subject group tweeted an average 2.8 million times a day.

To narrow down what they were tweeting about, Peerindex looked at the hashtags they used, then discarded any that were tweeted less than 500 times. Spam-like hashtags, such as contests, were also discarded. Eventually, each city ended up with a list of hashtags in order of their "local score" — meaning that hashtag was that many times more likely to show up in that city.

The Bay Area's top two spots went to MUNI-related hashtags, suggesting the city of San Francisco has its work cut out for it in improving transit. After that, the city's residents seems most interested in booze and technology, with startup and tech events such as Startup Weekend Oakland and RightsCon dominating the list alongside beer and wine. You can also see a lot of pride in the city, its landmarks and its sports teams.

Here are the top 35 local hashtags for San Francisco:

Image: Peerindex

New Yorkers, meanwhile, are all about the weather — and more specifically, the weather in commuter towns outside New York City. The most New York of hashtags in this time period was #cnywx, which covers the central New York state region, followed by the Star Wars-inspired description of Westchester as "Hothchester." Further down the list are hashtags covering local groups, nightclubs and neighborhoods.

The hottest neighborhood in New York? Sorry, Park Slope and Red Hook: according to this list, it's Washington Heights. Here are the top 35 local hashtags for New York City:

Image: Peerindex

If you prefer your data in a more visual form, here's a word cloud of the most popular categories of San Francisco hashtag:

Image: Peerindex

And here's New York:

Image: Peerindex

Let us know in the comments what you think these results tell us about the two cities.

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